Listics

Cultural Incompetents…

Here’s a post I find remarkable:

The Repressive Hypothesis

We spent some time in Queer Theory talking about the place of talk shows in modern discourse, trying to decide when the Confessional becomes the Sideshow. I brought this up again Wednesday night when we were discussing The Repressive Hypothesis, and we tossed it around for a while. We discussed the scripted fakery of shows like Jerry Springer, and Jeff compared it to Roland Barthes’ essay on wrestling, which presents the wrestling match as a morality play of sorts, a re-enactment of justice…. [continued at slimcoincidence arete]

In an email following that post I said, “If you have time to read it, perhaps even to provide a reflection, no matter how brief, critical, rancorous or scornful, I’ll appreciate it.  My engagement with this topic comes from some resentment I still feel that when I was a student of American Literature in the sixties, my teachers generally were not prepared to discuss Wallace Stegner, Thomas Pynchon, Ken Kesey, or Vladimir Nabokov. and certainly NOT Kerouac, Ginsberg, Bukowski, Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs and all.  I have a feeling things are much the same today and the focus on  critical method may overpower the brilliant content of artists of all ages.

Marek J (blogging most recently at Gonzo Engaged, but a Radio user since the nineties) was kind enough to respond.  Here’s what he said:

I vote to call the new age the “Unblinking Eyeball’s Lust For Manufactured Concerns.”  The age began with the release of the movie ‘Network’ in 1976. The ‘running out of bullshit’ was a first phase of this new age. New bullshit had to be manufactured. The second phase began by the Jerry Springer Show which elevated our Lust for Unblinkingness. It transformed bullshit into Concerns to Pay Attention to and caused us to discuss it at the Watercooler. This is the stage where manufacturing of Concerns began (culminated by President George Bush with the invention of Concerns Manufacturing Lust Machine in 2024). I believe we are entering now a third phase of this new age. Not sure what that is yet but it has to do with Reality Shows of Manufactured Tenderness and Cruelty. Shows like ‘Jackass’, ‘Real World’ and the Bachelor Varieties.

Marek’s right.  And while I am generally sensitive to gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer concerns, I have to wonder about the place for the great cultural opening classes that take up space in the academic world.  Why “women’s studies?”  Why “[ethnicity-label] studies?”  Why “queer concerns?

Building cultural competence, solidarity, empathy, and awareness are important goals and the campus community is an important place for this to happen.  But when I was a kid (besides walking thirty miles to class through drifting snow, uphill both ways) we shared community through an institution of our own called the “free university.”  A lot of learning happened, and a lot of consciousness-raising.  I’m afraid my generation was guilty of holding the institutions hostage to our demands that they include this material in core curricula, but I think it was probably a mistake.

The funding that scholars found to institutionalize “multi-cultural awareness” was not money well spent.  Opportunistic charismatics drove their post modernist stakes in the ground around these studies, shut down serious political discussion, and poisoned research in political science, anthropology and sociology.  The inmates took over the asylum, and the philosophers, who couldn’t really agree on WHY the classroom lights turned bright when the switch was flipped, suddenly found themselves to be responsible for foundational work that wedded the social sciences and the humanities in a shotgun marriage made in hell. 

It’s just occured to me that Slim’s “Queer Concerns” reference might be to other than a formal college sponsored for-credit class.  I hope that this is the case.   

Mark Woods links…

…to a collection of Jean Arp links in celebration of the old dadaist’s birthday.  If, as Arp wrote, ”Dada wished to destroy the hoaxes of reason and to discover an unreasoned order,” then I think Dada was post modernism emergent.

TranscendAnce…

French modern art contains the genius of Renoir, Matisse, Monet and more, much more.  But at some point, those of us with a classificatory or historical bent will want to draw a line and create a distinction:  up to this point is modern art; after this is something else, perhaps “post modern.”  And naturally, during some period this “post modernism” will wane and be replaced by the next thing.  Genres are mere folders in the file drawer containing what I’m talking about.

I’m engaged in a conversation with myself about when post modernism ended, and for that matter, when it began.  It seems obvious, but perhaps bears stating that the study of post modernism could not begin until post modernism itself was well advanced.  In fact the study itself sounds the death knell of the movement.  We can imagine post modernism popped into the ether bottle, then removed and pinned like a butterfly in the display case of criticism.  I’m betting V. Nabokov, ensconced in a hotel suite in Montreux, could feel the critical needle probing for his heart.  All his modern Russian work had long since been subsumed by his oeuvre in English: Ada providing apical dominance for the tree of the American novel for the next thirty years.

Cultural expression doesn’t move in lockstep fashion, with literature, graphic arts, theater, music, and ephemeral expressions (such as new modes of play) all advancing at the same pace through a critical context.  So post modern art will have different temporal boundaries from post modern literature, and post modern music.  One American novelist who transcends the boundaries between post modern and the perhaps neo-classical revival that has succeeded it, is Thomas Pynchon.  You can see the marvelous expression of  a hip, clear, dark vision in the first three novels, then a transcendance (as distinct from transcendEnce TYVM Jake Deridda) through a natural realism in Vineland to a three point landing in the structured framework of Mason and Dixon.

“…Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir’d, or coerc’d, only in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be left within the reach of anyone in Power,—who need but touch her, and all her Credit is in the instant vanish’d, as if it had never been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev’ry Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government…” (p.350)

The study of games seems like it would bear fruit if conducted in parallel with critical assessments of art, music, and literature.  One is reminded of the modern ascendancy of positional play in the chess world - Richard Reti’s dominance of the board with his cocked and loaded bishop pair covering the long diagonals.  From 1922 to 1950 - the modern period - the popularity of Alekhine’s defense declined.  Then from 1950 to 1970 - arguably a post modern period - the popularity of this opening increased to a peak.  Since 1970 it has dropped off and is about as popular today as it was during World War II.

There was a modern period in western culture, and it was over in the twenties or there-abouts.  There was a post modern period that emerged and it was certainly over by the time Bunuel filmed “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” in the early seventies.  Since that time, there has been a new cultural period that the academy has not addressed.  I suspect it could be labeled as a brand of neo-classicism.  Regardless what we call it, it seems ever more important to me that the gardeners in the academy return to tending their garden, prune the diseased sport of post modern theory from all but a few specimens necessary to provide context in our measurement of progress, and get on with the job of studying and learning and teaching what is and what we imagine.

The Chronicle…

I haven’t seen much of The Chronicle of Higher Education since I worked in Phil Lee’s office, and later for Frank Sooy at UCSF.  I always liked taking a break and reading the Chancellor’s CHE before I passed it on to him.  Tonight, surfing through the Invisible Adjunct’s blog space, and on to Kevin Walzer, I ran across the Chronicle again.  It was like a visit with an old friend, until I ran into the subscription authentication logon page.  Well, we were never really THAT close, CHE and me.

The “Scholars Who Blog” article was a fairly frothy poof piece, but at least Glenn Reynolds got his propers.  I was more deeply interested in reading about the ongoing overproduction of PhD.s in the Humanities. 

Colleges and universities occupy an awkward if interesting economic slot.  Their largest customer base is the population willing to pay them fees for educational services.  But oddly, academic management perceives those same people, when certified, to be their products.  So they cater to the demand for courses (which they bundle) and ultimately, when a customer has filled his/her market basket to overflowing and the bundle is complete, the customer him/herself is “productized” and fed into an anthropomorphic job market which is either hungry for a particular product (say PhDs in low temperature bio-crystallographic engineering, a post modern profession much esteemed among the rogues of wanton gene splicery) or glutted on the product (take your average English PhD… NO! You take him!).

If the English PhD has had the foresight to write a thesis on some Edwardian humorist, say - Thomas Love Peacock, then with perseverance he may rise through the tenured ranks and eventually make a living wage as an academic administrator, say Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs for a backwater state college system.  If however, the person, lacking perspicacity and wit, turned her mind to an interesting area like “From Symbol to Semiotics: the Definitive Arc of Post Modernism from the 1920s to the 1970s as expressed in the art of Luis Bunuel (film from the Andalusian Dog through  the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie)”… in this case there would be no hope for academic advancement or placement since so many of those already on the tenure track have such a vested interest in the continued propagation of post modernism that they necessarily fail to perceive that their interest is more properly historical than exigetic, that post modernism itself has come and gone although a few charming old scholars carry the message like Emerson eating pie in his Pullman coach on his way across America to meet John Muir in the high Sierras. 

Post moderns and the Fall of Man…

This is the second time in a month that I’ve seen the “life’s work” argument applied.  Last time I inadvertently pulled my own post in an effort to edit some white space around it.  It was a post I thought was bitter and humorous and pointed.  The point was that post moderns are wave of the past and it would be useful to find out what’s happening now.

I have opened a new category on my blog, “Anti-intellectual Thuggery,” and it is there that I hope to explore this matter with all the sophomoric ill-humor I can muster.